Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a number of disk drives that have either been swapped out of computers in active use, or that have been pulled from systems being completely decommissioned and stripped for parts. I normally either donate or resell used hardware as it turns up, since most of my equipment ends up in good condition. Disk drives are a particular problem though, and I only pass them along after they’ve been completely erased, to avoid accidentally leaking personal or business data.

In the past, the only way to wipe the drives once they’re removed was to open up a chassis, hook the drive up to the IDE or SCSI interface so you could run the disk erase utility of your choice. I also used to have a bulk degausser for erasing magnetic tape which is probably still in the garage somewhere, but I’m not sure it would work on today’s hard drives anyway.

I recently realized that you can use the DIY external hard drive enclosures to temporarily connect old IDE drives to a live computer over USB or Firewire, greatly simplifying the mechanics. No more opening up a live system or setting up a dedicated system for the sole purpose of wiping out old hard drives. At the moment, you can get a generic USB hard drive enclosure from Amazon for about $20.00.

Once the drive is connected, you can use any disk erase utility to wipe out the previous contents of the disk. At the moment, I like Eraser, which is free, and makes GPL’ed source code available. The important point is to not only format your old drive, but to overwrite the previous contents of the disk. Formatting the disk will only clear the file directory entries, and leaves the underlying data intact until overwritten with something else.

As an aside, there is also a handy (but dangerous) open source utility called Darik’s Boot and Nuke aka DBAN. DBAN is included with the Eraser download, so you don’t need to get it separately. It which creates a bootable disk that will search for all connected hard drives and erase them. It should be obvious, but if you download this, be sure to CLEARLY LABEL YOUR DISK and don’t leave it in a bootable disk drive by accident.

In the past few days I have erased several 3.5 inch IDE drives using the external drive enclosure with Eraser, but I also have several 2.5 inch notebook drives which will require a different connector before I can wipe those as well.

The past few days I’ve been setting up a clean install of Windows XP on a generic PC. Aside from figuring out the mysterious installation failure which turned out to be due to smudges on the retail media, it’s been taking a while to get a basic load of software together.

This system is eventually getting shipped to my Dad, who only has dialup access. It’s also hard to do remote access over dialup and its impractical to download hundreds of megabytes of installation packages, so I’m trying to get everything installed before shipping, as proactive “family tech support”. He doesn’t spend a lot of time online, and mostly just checks e-mail and uses Microsoft Word from time to time.

Here’s the software set I’m installing:

• Windows XP
• All current patches from Windows Update
• All current driver patches for the system hardware
• Microsoft Office
• All current patches from Office Update
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Flash and Shockwave players
• Apple Quicktime
• Firefox
• AVG Antivirus

The hardware is a generic “Great Quality” computer from Fry’s Electronics. It originally came with ThizLinux installed, which allows them to sell the hardware without charging for Windows. I originally got the system to run some lightweight networking code on CentOS, so that worked out well for me. Presumably, many people end up running bootleg copies of Windows on the generic hardware, as it actually comes with a CD of Windows drivers for the video, audio, LAN, and modem hardware.

It’s been interesting installing from retail media. I haven’t done this in a long time, as I usually (re)install from recovery media generated from a preloaded system (e.g. my Thinkpad) or from bulk licensed media such as MSDN or a site/volume license. The retail CD has a shiny hologram on it and comes in a glossy cardboard foldout, presumably to make you feel like you’re getting you’re money’s worth. Too bad the CD itself was barely readable, due to scuff marks from the packaging.

There are an amazing number of Windows patches on first install. The first pass turned up 48 patches. There were more which turned up after the first set was complete, but I didn’t keep track. The Microsoft Office updates also turned up a few large packages. The system wouldn’t reboot cleanly after installing some of the Office updates the first time, which required reverting to the pre-install restore point and trying again. I have mixed feelings about it successfully installing after a few more tries. All things being equal, you’d think that the subsequent installation attempts should also fail, or the first one should have succeeded.

Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat, and Quicktime are all commonly used on many consumer-oriented sites, and are many megabytes of download, so those went on as well. I also installed AVG Antivirus, which is free for personal use, and can be updated periodically, like other antivirus services. I usually run Norton on my personal systems, but those require a paid annual subscription, which doesn’t seem worth it for a light-duty system on a dialup line.

I’ve been testing the system through intermittent startup / shutdown cycles and miscellaneous web browsing for a few days and it seems to be stable. I can’t imagine a typical retail customer managing the initial patch and installation process successfully, though, which helps explain why there is so much botnet traffic (presumably originating from unpatched desktop systems) in my server logs. I probably should have looked for a bootlegged but already patched WinXP installer on BitTorrent instead of building the system from scratch. Microsoft should provide this themselves if they don’t already, since the activation key is unique and is printed on a label pasted to the retail packaging. The physical CD is almost unreadable and is months out of date, so a downloadable ISO would have been better anyway.

I’m done with this project for now, but let me know if you have a better solution for bringing up a fully patched, basic WinXP system for home use.

I got a trial copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 in the conference bag from Gnomedex last week. I’m tempted to try it out, but am reluctant to be the first to try installing this version on a T42P, as the Thinkpad is my primary system lately and I don’t have a lot of spare time to rebuild it if the installation goes sideways. Quick search this afternoon turns up people working with earlier versions.

Update 07-08-2006 10:45PDT: Some useful notes on running the Vista beta in this thread at Thinkpads.com.